> I would think that putting up material to be downloaded in order to finger people would ammount to entrapment,
Not really.
As I understand entrapment, it's only entrapment if you actively encourage the crim^H^H^H^Hvictim to commit the crime.
Gnutella users have plenty of opportunity, once they see that Metallica track on honeypot.riaa.com, to Just Say No.
If they walk away from the bait, they're not guilty -- even if they searched for "Metallica" to find the bait in the first place -- because there's no law against searching for infringing material.
Only when they elect (of their own free will) to download what they reasonably believe to be infringing material, have they committed a crime.
Unless there's a RIAA rep saying "hey man, download that Metallica song from my server, fuck the system man! Be an MP3 r3b3l d00d!" in some chatroom at the same time as the poor bugger finds his way to the honeypot, it's not entrapment.
From law.com:
entrapment, N.: in criminal law, the act of law enforcement officers or government agents inducing or encouraging a person to commit a crime when the potential criminal expresses a desire not to go ahead. The key to entrapment is whether the idea for the commission or encouragement of the criminal act originated with the police or government agents instead of with the "Criminal." Entrapment, if proved, is a defense to a criminal prosecution. The accused often claims entrapment in so-called "stings" in which undercover agents buy or sell narcotics, prostitutes' services or arrange to purchase believed to be stolen. The factual question is: "Would Johnny Begood have purchased the drugs if not pressed by the Narc."
While it's true that the potential criminal in the case of Gnutella has neither expressed nor not-expressed a desire not to go ahead with the crime, it's pretty clear that searching for "Metallica" and downloading "Metallica.mp3" on Gnutella are almost always things that originated with the soon-to-be-criminal, and not the cops, the RIAA, or NetPD.
I have no love for the RIAA and frankly think that this is a pretty disgusting tactic. But as repugnant as it is, it's probably not entrapment.
The moral of the story is that you need a distributed and chained network of anonymizing proxies, as well as strong crypto between each link, to make a truly bulletproof system. Any system where there's direct client-to-client contact renders you visible to the world.
Don't think that this is only a concern for cablemodem users and those with static IPs. If you're on dialup IP, remember that most of those dialup ports resolve to a geographical identifier. If there are 500 Metallica downloads and 400 Frank Sinata downloads from the class C block ipXYZ.yourcity.yourisp.com, odds are good that there are only two violators, and it's a simple process for your ISP, once subpoenaed, to prove it and nail them both.
If it explains a way to insert VBR headers into an MP3 that was created without 'em, I'm there, dude.
Most annoying thing I've seen - only once or twice out of $BIGNUM MP3s - was an MP3 that wouldn't report its time correctly in WinAMP.
I'm not talking about "normal" VBRs, which are pretty close to accurate on the track length, and which show the bitrate changing from 128/160/224/226/whatever as the song plays.
I'm talking about a VBR MP3 where the track length is totally misreported. As in, it varies by 20-30% depending on where in the song you happen to be playing at the moment, and the bitrate indicator shows an oddball number like 147kbps.
I believe that this problem is due to someone encoding in LAME with the -t (disable VBR tag) flag set. But I'm damned if I can figure out how to re-create said tag given only the final MP3.
Any suggestions? It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
> the bureaucracy isn't accidental or undesired. [... ] The lines [... ] enforce discipline, respect, and fear. Fear of a wasted day, fear of an inexplicable fine, fear of a missing sheet of paper.
Amen. There are other reasons why the Good Things Katz suggests will never happen:
Government doesn't need to be responsive to the people. Unlike Snow Crash, you can't just dump your government by moving to the nearest competing franchulate. Sure, you can vote out the current puppet ostensibly running it, but the bureaucracy remains. No matter who you vote for, the government wins the election. They still own all the land, and they own enough guns to back it up if you disagree.
Tech companies value innovators. Bureaucracies fear them. If you have to hire 10 people to run your linekiller.gov web server, you're gonna hafta find 10 geeks who don't mind living in Snow Crash's "Fedland" - lots of drudgery, little productive work done, and about half the money they can get by walking down the street to the nearest "Private Sector Franchulate". (Although you can't dump your government, and although most of what you make at work ends up there, at least you can choose not to live there!)
Technologists value brains. Politicians value bodies. If you're a politician, would you rather "create 100 jobs at $20K" or "create 10 jobs at $200K" in your district? Which one looks better at election time? Hiring the 100 people probably means another 20 people to keep the building in one piece, and if you're lucky, a few million bucks to build a new building in the first place. Pork talks.
Similarly, in a government office (from a few of my friends' parents who worked there) headcount is a proxy for value. A manager with 10 reports - even if they're high-tech guys doing the same work as 100 drones - is far less important in the swivel servant pecking order.
Companies produce things at great cost to themselves - efficiency is a Good Thing. Governments consume things at no cost to themselves - efficient operations are actually counterproductive in terms of what government is designed to do. In government, if it takes 3 months and 100 drones to do one hour of actual work on a form, for instance, that's not a sign that your process has broken down and needs reengineering, it's merely prima facie evidence that you need to hire more drones and more managers to write more procedures for them. The Snow Crash passage on Fedland is particularly enlightening here. (For those who haven't read it, it lists patch after patch after patch on a set of broken employee conduct procedures. Bad processes are re-engineered out of the private sector - in government, they're ossified into it because it takes nothing to create a new regulation, and a monumental effort to repeal an old one. Imagine writing code without a backspace key or the ability to delete lines.)
A "use it or lose it" mentality when it comes to budgeting. Along with valuing headcount, budget matters. If you don't spend all the money you were allocated this year, you won't get as much next year. The system encourages waste by rewarding it at all levels. Anyone who brings in technology to service the same number of people at a tenth of the cost is committing career suicide.
Finally, the more cynical part of me says that along with the bit about fearing innovators and creating a work environment that only a brainless drone would want to deal with -- well, somebody's gotta hire the brainless drones! Whether you pay them $10K tax-free to live on welfare, or $20K to sit in an air-conditioned office (and get $10K in taxes back;-), it costs the same to the taxpayer, and at least it's a little more humane for the drudges.
> You seem to be invoking the "holy internet principles" again; a common malady [among slashdotters]
Guilty as charged;)
That said, the people on the other side of this debate seem to be invoking an opposit sense of holy principles: "why don't you want to spend all your life downloading and installing flaky closed-source plugins and customizing your browser to our marketing department's whims".
I posit that yours is an equally common malady among marketroids.
If your target market is only users who have high-bandwidth connections and who use IE99.9 with all the latest privacy-invading closed-source trojans and plugins, by all means, design for them and tell anyone whose User-Agent doesn't measure up to your standards to go to hell.
But don't be surprised if your server logs start seeing references to pages like "you_lost_a_customer.html" from people who only wanted to buy stuff from you, but whom you deemed unworthy.
Designing for only one browser or requiring a custom plugin is fundamentally no different than telling someone "Looky heah, boah, this heah's a Whites Only wat'rin hole! Y'all gawddamn Nig^H^Hetscape usahs kin jest git to th'back of th'bus!"
While I'd be the last person to argue that browser-discrimination is anywhere near as important as race discrimination, I believe the analogy holds: You "never signed off on any internet principles" - that's fine, I agree you're free to discriminate on any criteria you wish, I'd love to hear your business case for it.
I'm serious here -- what are you doing that's so special that Netscape users shouldn't see it? Or that people on Macintoshes, IRIX boxes, or Suns shouldn't see? With user attention spans measured in seconds, what makes your site so important that I should want to spend 5 minutes (or 20 minutes!) downloading a plug-in, or that I should have to stop what I'm doing to fire up a different web browser, or that I should have to get up and walk over to an officemate's Wintel box to see it? Or even that I should have to lift a finger for the three or four mouse clicks to enable Java/Javascript?
When you design for accessibility, you maximize the size of your potential market. In business, a larger potential market is generally considered a good thing, and it has nothing to do with sound bites from Tim.
Bottom line: If your site won't let me shop or browse at it until I bow to your marketing department's whims, there are plenty of sites who will. They'll get my money and traffic instead.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
> The request was bolstered by declarations filed by > Motion Picture Association of America president > Jack Valenti and MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson. > Robertson
, to whom Hilary Rosen affectionately referred during the filings as "you know, Mikie, my bitch". The origin of the reference is unclear, but sources close to the industry report that Ms. Rosen has taken to wearing black patent leather and carrying a riding crop - and Mr. Robertson playing the part of "ponyboy" and "dildoboy" at recording industry social events ever since the settlement between mp3.com and RIAA. Ms. Rosen's bitch
> supported the recording industry's claim [... ]
Ah, that reads much better.
Journalists can never trust editors not to cut out the important parts of stories these days, y'know?
>[ping]...[ping]...[ping] > Seaman: Sir! Sonar detected! > Captain: Get a fix on it, mister! > Seaman: Yessir...it's coming from 10.128.144.6! > Captain: Torpedo room! Lock onto ping source and fire at will!
Hey, 10.*.*.* is friendly fire!
(Of course, if you're broadcasing your presence at 10.*.*.* over the external network, that's different. In that case, you probably deserve to get blowed up real good!)
As others have said - for military use, this is probably a Bad Idea.
OTOH, given that present military communication tech for subs is much slower than 2400bps, it may have some value in the event that a sub commander deems it necessary to risk detection versus in order to have high-speed communications for a few hours. Although communication via this method is detectable, it's probably much less detectable than surfacing and using radio, for instance.
Because the relay is in the form of a buoy, I envision an aircraft dropping a disposable relay buoy in the general vicinity of the sub (along with a bunch of decoys not in the general vicinity of the sub;-) and the buoys self-destructing a few hours later after the message has been transmitted or received.
The most likely applications, however, are likely to be civilian. There are plenty of underwater activities involving submersibles - both human-piloted and remotely-piloted - that could benefit from this. That the test was carried out on a military vessel is more of a "marketing" thing - if there are potential military applications, who better to have test it? The commercial application may be where the profits are made, but the military can serve a valuable role on the R&D side while the bugs get worked out.
An AC writes: > but what does Scientology have to do with this movie - did they fund it?
Not directly. But Travolta basically used his power as a Hollywood star to get this movie made. And Travolta (and wife Kirstie Alley) is the "poster boy" for the cult in Hollywood.
Travolta is used by the cult as a walking billboard. Any interview with him will read "I did Saturday Night Fever, my career fell apart, I got into drugs/alcohol, then I found $cientology, which cleaned up my life and made me able again, able enough to do Pulp Fiction, and my career picked up and now I've got this lovely spokesclam of a wife to boink, and lots of money, and now I'm a success again! You should really give it a try, it changed my life, yadda yadda yadda".
(Incidentally, ever notice that cult only touts Hollywood celebrities as success stories? How come there are no scientists, for instance? About the only non-celebrity I can think of would be Sky Dayton of Earthlink, but in order to make his company work, he basically had to abandon $cieno management practices pretty early on.)
Anyways, the cult has had a longstanding tradition of influence and power in Hollyweird, and without Travolta's insistence on behalf of the cult, this movie would never have been made. Travolta was basically given free reign - and as cult posterboy, had a seriously sincere desire to - to make the best movie he could out of an Elron Blubbard novel.
WHich is why, despite no direct cult funding of the movie, the references to "this is the best $cientology has to offer" aren't entirely misplaced.
Finkployd writes: > Scientology is not a religion, It is a business. (some would say mafia like business)
Hey, stop insulting the Mafia!
Sure, both the mob and the Co$ use violence and coercion to further their own ends, but at least the Mafia provides a range of valuable consumer services: recreational pharmaceuticals, sexual pleasure, gambling, and so on. Hangin' out at a mob-run outfit - or even just delivering pizza for the mob - can be fun. Didn'tcha ever read Snow Crash?
Last time I checked, the only recreational activity offered by the Co$ was talking to ashtrays, and the guests at a Co$ hotel's "spa" either received overdoses of Niacin in the sauna, or died of pulmonary embolisms brought on by dehydration and bed rest, and were nibbled on by cockroaches before their bodies were hauled off to the fifth-nearest hospital (but the nearest one with a Co$-appointed doctor!) for "emergency" treatment.
Mafia, Inc. (tm) provides the customer with a much higher level of satisfaction than Co$ ever did.:-)
> [... ] it will likely spell the end of Hollywood's love affair with Scientology [ because ] Battlefield Earth has now associated Scientology with the term 'box-office poison'.
Battlefield Earth is probably the first time in its life that the Cult of $cientology has engaged in truthful advertising in terms of what "being more able" is really like.
Corollary: "This is your brain / This is your brain on $cientology." $cieno salesdrones often encourage potential suckers to "just try it for yourself". Compared to the costs of joining the cult "just to see what it's all about", if you really wanna find out what $cientology does to your brain, $8.00 is a bargain.
Speaking of lyrics.ch, why the hell wasn't there a mirror site? I found the original lyrics.ch site useful enough that I'd have gladly eaten up a few hundred megabytes of my hard drive to hold my own local copy of it;)
> If you look at any adverstisement with bill in it, you'll notice that Bill looks > friendly in some way. The fact of the matter is, is that Bill doesn't want to look like > the 'richest person in the world', he wants to look like your next door neighbor, somebody > who you wouldn't dare of commiting such business atrocities.
An MSFT press release reads: > [... ] many elements of the government's proposal that we think go beyond what's reasonable. It's not just the breakup, but also the [... ] "
Is it just me, or does my bullshit detector go off the scale whenever I see multibillion dollar companies using apostrophes in press release?
Do these companies ever use "chatty" language riddled with apostrophes when speaking the "truth" (albeit bastardized) to their shareholders? Never. To their politicians? To their lobby groups? To their lawyers? Never, never, never.
The only time you'll see colloquialisms and apostrophes in press releases is when there's not even a grain of truth involved. It's a surefire sign that you're getting pure bullshit, as it were, as opposed to the normal, lower-grade bullshit that usually appears in press releases. It's a major red flag that says everything in the press release is a lie, that your argument doesn't have a leg to stand on, and the best your PR managers can do for you is to make you look "more human" by "talking down" to the peons in informal language.
When you or I do it on Slashdot, it's because we're speaking from the heart. When a PR flack does it, it's merely obvious that the sincerity is being faked. And poorly, at that.
We're not buying your act, Bill. Not for a fscking second. Use all the apostrophes you want. We see through your PR flacks.
Re:One sole owner, one sole licencee.
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 2
> Warnock says that " [... We're] going to have a piece of software that will only > work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience."
"Gee, Tonto, them sure is a lotta angry Injuns! We're in a heap o' trouble if they find us!"
- Lone Ranger to Tonto
"What you mean 'we', white boy?"
- Tonto to the Lone Ranger
I can't help what Warnock will personally have, nor what will inconvenience him. But as for me, I will have music that will play on any device I own. I will have software that will work on all of my machines.
He's right in that "[heavy licensing] will provide enormous inconvenience". He's just not right in assuming it'll provide any inconvenience for anyone other than himself and the rest of his dinosaur buddies.
When it becomes sufficiently inconvenient for businesses to get the job done with closed-source, shrinkwrap-infested proprietary bloatware, it'll be in the interests of shareholders to move to something better. Officers of corporations will have a fiduciary duty to move to open source.
I can deal with that just fine. So can the company I write software for. Can Adobe and Micros~1?
> Maybe, with enough work, we could finally get him to say something useful for once
Hell, I'd be content for him to use the "1" key in his dates. A lowercase "l" hasn't been substitutable for a "1" in a date since the age of the typewriter.
It's not just this article - look at damn near every article it writes - every time he means "19xx" as a year, it types "l9xx".
Congrats to the coder who fixed the "Micros~1 compliant quotes" bug. Can we have him pipe its output through sed and s/l9/19/g before it goes to Slashdot in the next revision?
I suppose the original idea was to add a little "human touch" to it, because no software would make an error like that, only an older human raised on typewriters. But to me, it's just tiresome:-)
> What is wrong with this? If no one is interested in a topic then they shouldn't waste time writing about it. One way to gauge interest is by breaking up the article and seeing how far people get.
I have nothing against the site splitting the article and tracking users. If wired.com is supplying me with content, I'm happy to tell wired.com, through my mouse clicks, which wired.com stories I read all the way through. It's already in their server logs. So why do they need Doublefsck?
The only use of the LAYER tag on Wired is to send that information to third parties. Doublefsck isn't telling Wired what I'm reading - Wired's server already knows what I'm reading.
Doublefsck is trying to accumulate a profile that tells them what I read on every site that has doublefsck.com links in LAYER tags. Wired is the one I mention because it's so blatant - I see five or six LAYER tags being loaded in my browser's status bar with every mouse click. Sheesh. But how many other sites do I visit that are using the same technology, but only send one transaction and I've therefore missed? Salon? NY Times? The political parties and special interest groups? nakednatalies.com?
What I read off a site belongs between me and the content provider. Wired can tell I'm interested in MP3s, free speech, and cool hardware. mp3.com knows what kind of music I listen to. Nakednatalies.com knows I'm into hot grit pr0n. The political sites know what kind of a jackass, elephant, or neither I'm likely to vote for in October.
But if all four of those sites use tracking technology, then doublefsck knows all about my hobbies, my sexual tastes, and my politics.
I have a major problem with that.
Why should doublefsck know that I'm the type of guy who likes to watch elephants and jackasses mating on TV while pouring hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants while the Cocky Sticks play "I'm a Catholic Girl, of course I swallow!" in the background?
> when I see the URL points to some tracking cgi I say forget it. I want to know where I'm going to be sent before I click on something - and doubleclick is not a place I want to visit!
I think we're in complete agreement here. It's just that Doublefsck is sneaking a slimy tentacle into more than just banner ads through use of the LAYER tags and other invasive technologies.
> But what can I do with the Windows hosts file? Isn't it just a way of associating names with IPs that DNS doesn't take care of, like with local networks?
Yes.
But IIRC, the wildcards don't work in the Windows version of HOSTS, though. So you can't just add "127.0.0.1 *.doubleclick.net" - you have to have an entry for each offending host. (Any Windoze folks who know otherwise, please enclue me - I don't think wildcards work on Windoze HOSTS files, but can't remember whether I tried it or not.)
While proxies are generally a Very Good Idea (and more elegant, since they can strip out the ad altogether or render it as a single-pixel GIF), I'm a fan of the philosophy of using as much stuff that's already built into your system as possible. Every application you add is another potential thing that can break. Using HOSTS on Windoze lets me fix it (and remove the fix) with a single command (and of course, the ever-present reboot). Nothing to "install" or "uninstall".
For instance, I can surf with images off if I don't have a proxy handy, and avoid the animated.GIFs.
But there are other ways to track you that don't require banner ads. Look at all the layer tags:
<LAYER SRC="http://ln.doubleclick.net"></LAYER>
...in stories on http://www.wired.com lately.
Worse yet - because many news sites break up their stories into two or three "pages", the Doublecross.coms of the world don't just know *what* you read, but how *fast* you read it, and whether you read just the first page and throw it away as "uninteresting" or the followup pages of the article.
*THAT*'s the value of breaking news articles up into dozens of 2-paragraph pieces, by the way. The extra banner impressions aren't worth it, but the tracking information you get as to which users read which stories all the way through is worth its weight in gold.
What we need is a HOWto on route. One per platform, covering all the idiosyncrasies. Don't write it for sysadmins, write it for everyone, like the guy who just installed DeadRat and has a root prompt.
...a part of our setups, and we need it to scale up to all the tracking sites. (I'd guess at least 1000, maybe 2000 hosts at present.)
We need to tell our users what to put in what files, and how to extend it to the rest of their network, and how to make it *stick* no matter how many times DNS tries to bring it back from the dead. (Fscking Slowaris fscking fsck fsck fsck! I should *NOT* have to run that route command more than once per bootup!)
Windoze users have the ability of creating a huge HOSTS file in their system directory. It's a one-step thing. Trivial.
A quickie HOWTO on how to do the same thing, for all the various Unices, would be a welcome addition. (It's kinda an ugly fix to do this in/etc/hosts on a UNIX box, as this is basically the *opposite* of what/etc/hosts was designed for. But it's a damn effective solution on Windoze.)
Right - it's meant in irony - the source is Voltaire's commentary on the court-martial and hanging of Admiral Byng. (Byng was grossly outnumbered, and ran away - as a result, he was executed for "cowardice".)
"C'est necessaire quelquefois a suspendre un admiral ou deux, pour encourager les autres." ("It is necessary sometimes, to hang an admiral or two, to encourage/enhearten the others";-)
Although Voltaire originally meant it in the sense of "beatings will continue until morale improves", the quip has also developed a second sense, namely "punish excessively and make an example out of the offender". While not quite historically faithful, it certainly has a nice ring to it when used in conjunction with the image of a row of spammer heads on pikes.
> On va leur couper les couilles et leur faire manger, violer leur femme et mettre leur tête sur un pic... (that's better:)
Well, I dunno.
As for leur couper les couilles et leur faire manger, you'd starve to death on the contents thereof, and as for violer leur femme, we're talking about spammers here. Given what goes into spammer DNA, do you really think a spammers's mother, sister, or first cousin is gonna be much to look at? OK, not every spammer falls into that category, but the few spammers who didn't marry blood relatives are probably hooked up with goats and sheep, which is just Not My Kink.
...and because an open relay is effectively an "attractive nuisance"...
What will happen (I mean, after the spammers rape the fsck out of it) if you don't fix it.
But I disagree with you here:
> [... ] I don't think they deserve any compensation [... ] It's their own fault [... ]
While they're dorks for not having secured it, this is just blaming the victim.
Although it's not smart for a woman to walk down a dark alley at 3 in the morning, staggering as if drunk, while wearing a miniskirt and low-cut blouse that doesn't mean "she asked for it" if she ends up raped. (My apologies to rape victims for that example - you're the best example I can think of to explain that "blame the victim" is bogus.)
The incompetence of the admins at Market Visions (whose server, like all open relays, essentially was staggering down a blind alley, sloshed to the gills, wearing a low-cut blouse and hot pink mini...) does not take away from the fact that their property was violated, nor should it, IMHO, detract from their rights to compensation.
(Of course, we're in complete agreement that a more competent admin would have prevented the problem from requiring a lawsuit or criminal charges in the first place. That's why you pay your admins the big bucks -- preventing a breach is always cheaper than cleaning up after one, and a good sysadmin is worth his or her weight in gold.)
Juno and Hotmail have sued spammers (e.g., the "TCPS" spammer from a couple of years back) for forging their domain names into fake email addresses inserted in the From: header. The forging caused clueless people to send countless bogus abuse reports to Juno and Hotmail abuse desks, consuming their resources. IIRC, uu.net got into the act too, as most of the spams were coming from a long series of uu.net dialups in an area of NYC that didn't have caller-ID.
There's the "flowers.com case", where a spammer issued a forged HELO flowers.com when doing a spam in order to fool (ancient) versions of Sendmail into hiding the spammer's originating IP address when raping a third-party relay. $65000 in damages because it defamed the legitimate owner of flowers.com at the time.
It's trademark infringement as well. You purport that your mail comes from AOL, it's AOL's business that you're using their domain name. AOL's landsharks have been known to sue spammers for falsely implying that spam comes from AOL. More power to 'em.
Finally, in the cases of "joe jobs" - where a spammer will forge spam in the name of someone in order to target the forged party for harassment - it's obvious that there's intent to defame, harass, and of course, willful misrepresentation.
The forging of headers in unsolicited bulk email should be at the very least a civil, if not a criminal, offense.
The real problem, of course, is that since your average spammer lives in a trailer surrounded by beer cans and chicken bones, collecting anything from a spammer can be a real problem.
Which is why it's relatively rare that ISPs sue or press criminal charges against spammers. More's the pity. There's a group of spammers operating out of Earthlink dialups in a manner identical to that of the TCPS spammer's abuse of uu.net dialups a few years ago, and Earthlink is doing nothing about it. More's the pity.
But back to the original article on ABCNews:
The son of a bitch not only spammed, but he raped a relay to do it. That's theft of computer services at a minimum, and given the number of bounced spams that probably came back to the raped relay at Market Vision, probably a DOS attack too.
Throw the book at the son of a bitch and put his head on a pike. Pour encourager les autres.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really.
As I understand entrapment, it's only entrapment if you actively encourage the crim^H^H^H^Hvictim to commit the crime.
Gnutella users have plenty of opportunity, once they see that Metallica track on honeypot.riaa.com, to Just Say No.
If they walk away from the bait, they're not guilty -- even if they searched for "Metallica" to find the bait in the first place -- because there's no law against searching for infringing material.
Only when they elect (of their own free will) to download what they reasonably believe to be infringing material, have they committed a crime.
Unless there's a RIAA rep saying "hey man, download that Metallica song from my server, fuck the system man! Be an MP3 r3b3l d00d!" in some chatroom at the same time as the poor bugger finds his way to the honeypot, it's not entrapment.
From law.com:
While it's true that the potential criminal in the case of Gnutella has neither expressed nor not-expressed a desire not to go ahead with the crime, it's pretty clear that searching for "Metallica" and downloading "Metallica.mp3" on Gnutella are almost always things that originated with the soon-to-be-criminal, and not the cops, the RIAA, or NetPD.
I have no love for the RIAA and frankly think that this is a pretty disgusting tactic. But as repugnant as it is, it's probably not entrapment.
The moral of the story is that you need a distributed and chained network of anonymizing proxies, as well as strong crypto between each link, to make a truly bulletproof system. Any system where there's direct client-to-client contact renders you visible to the world.
Don't think that this is only a concern for cablemodem users and those with static IPs. If you're on dialup IP, remember that most of those dialup ports resolve to a geographical identifier. If there are 500 Metallica downloads and 400 Frank Sinata downloads from the class C block ipXYZ.yourcity.yourisp.com, odds are good that there are only two violators, and it's a simple process for your ISP, once subpoenaed, to prove it and nail them both.
Most annoying thing I've seen - only once or twice out of $BIGNUM MP3s - was an MP3 that wouldn't report its time correctly in WinAMP.
I'm not talking about "normal" VBRs, which are pretty close to accurate on the track length, and which show the bitrate changing from 128/160/224/226/whatever as the song plays.
I'm talking about a VBR MP3 where the track length is totally misreported. As in, it varies by 20-30% depending on where in the song you happen to be playing at the moment, and the bitrate indicator shows an oddball number like 147kbps.
I believe that this problem is due to someone encoding in LAME with the -t (disable VBR tag) flag set. But I'm damned if I can figure out how to re-create said tag given only the final MP3.
Any suggestions? It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
Amen. There are other reasons why the Good Things Katz suggests will never happen:
Guilty as charged ;)
That said, the people on the other side of this debate seem to be invoking an opposit sense of holy principles: "why don't you want to spend all your life downloading and installing flaky closed-source plugins and customizing your browser to our marketing department's whims".
I posit that yours is an equally common malady among marketroids.
If your target market is only users who have high-bandwidth connections and who use IE99.9 with all the latest privacy-invading closed-source trojans and plugins, by all means, design for them and tell anyone whose User-Agent doesn't measure up to your standards to go to hell.
But don't be surprised if your server logs start seeing references to pages like "you_lost_a_customer.html" from people who only wanted to buy stuff from you, but whom you deemed unworthy.
Designing for only one browser or requiring a custom plugin is fundamentally no different than telling someone "Looky heah, boah, this heah's a Whites Only wat'rin hole! Y'all gawddamn Nig^H^Hetscape usahs kin jest git to th'back of th'bus!"
While I'd be the last person to argue that browser-discrimination is anywhere near as important as race discrimination, I believe the analogy holds: You "never signed off on any internet principles" - that's fine, I agree you're free to discriminate on any criteria you wish, I'd love to hear your business case for it.
I'm serious here -- what are you doing that's so special that Netscape users shouldn't see it? Or that people on Macintoshes, IRIX boxes, or Suns shouldn't see? With user attention spans measured in seconds, what makes your site so important that I should want to spend 5 minutes (or 20 minutes!) downloading a plug-in, or that I should have to stop what I'm doing to fire up a different web browser, or that I should have to get up and walk over to an officemate's Wintel box to see it? Or even that I should have to lift a finger for the three or four mouse clicks to enable Java/Javascript?
When you design for accessibility, you maximize the size of your potential market. In business, a larger potential market is generally considered a good thing, and it has nothing to do with sound bites from Tim.
Bottom line: If your site won't let me shop or browse at it until I bow to your marketing department's whims, there are plenty of sites who will. They'll get my money and traffic instead.
http://www.anybrowser.org
Because...
- Tim Berners-Lee.Nuff said.
I dunno, I think seeing the brass at Mattel thrown behind bars for arms trafficking would be a good thing. Take your pick.
- If they go to jail, it's poetic justice for suing people for CPHack
- If they walk, it'll be because they spent enough money on legislators to buy us sane crypto regs.
Talk about a win/win situation!> The request was bolstered by declarations filed by
> Motion Picture Association of America president
> Jack Valenti and MP3.com CEO Michael Robertson.
> Robertson
, to whom Hilary Rosen affectionately referred during the filings as "you know, Mikie, my bitch". The origin of the reference is unclear, but sources close to the industry report that Ms. Rosen has taken to wearing black patent leather and carrying a riding crop - and Mr. Robertson playing the part of "ponyboy" and "dildoboy" at recording industry social events ever since the settlement between mp3.com and RIAA. Ms. Rosen's bitch
> supported the recording industry's claim [ ... ]
Ah, that reads much better.
Journalists can never trust editors not to cut out the important parts of stories these days, y'know?
> Seaman: Sir! Sonar detected!
> Captain: Get a fix on it, mister!
> Seaman: Yessir...it's coming from 10.128.144.6!
> Captain: Torpedo room! Lock onto ping source and fire at will!
Hey, 10.*.*.* is friendly fire!
(Of course, if you're broadcasing your presence at 10.*.*.* over the external network, that's different. In that case, you probably deserve to get blowed up real good!)
OTOH, given that present military communication tech for subs is much slower than 2400bps, it may have some value in the event that a sub commander deems it necessary to risk detection versus in order to have high-speed communications for a few hours. Although communication via this method is detectable, it's probably much less detectable than surfacing and using radio, for instance.
Because the relay is in the form of a buoy, I envision an aircraft dropping a disposable relay buoy in the general vicinity of the sub (along with a bunch of decoys not in the general vicinity of the sub ;-) and the buoys self-destructing a few hours later after the message has been transmitted or received.
The most likely applications, however, are likely to be civilian. There are plenty of underwater activities involving submersibles - both human-piloted and remotely-piloted - that could benefit from this. That the test was carried out on a military vessel is more of a "marketing" thing - if there are potential military applications, who better to have test it? The commercial application may be where the profits are made, but the military can serve a valuable role on the R&D side while the bugs get worked out.
> but what does Scientology have to do with this movie - did they fund it?
Not directly. But Travolta basically used his power as a Hollywood star to get this movie made. And Travolta (and wife Kirstie Alley) is the "poster boy" for the cult in Hollywood.
Travolta is used by the cult as a walking billboard. Any interview with him will read "I did Saturday Night Fever, my career fell apart, I got into drugs/alcohol, then I found $cientology, which cleaned up my life and made me able again, able enough to do Pulp Fiction, and my career picked up and now I've got this lovely spokesclam of a wife to boink, and lots of money, and now I'm a success again! You should really give it a try, it changed my life, yadda yadda yadda".
(Incidentally, ever notice that cult only touts Hollywood celebrities as success stories? How come there are no scientists, for instance? About the only non-celebrity I can think of would be Sky Dayton of Earthlink, but in order to make his company work, he basically had to abandon $cieno management practices pretty early on.)
Anyways, the cult has had a longstanding tradition of influence and power in Hollyweird, and without Travolta's insistence on behalf of the cult, this movie would never have been made. Travolta was basically given free reign - and as cult posterboy, had a seriously sincere desire to - to make the best movie he could out of an Elron Blubbard novel.
WHich is why, despite no direct cult funding of the movie, the references to "this is the best $cientology has to offer" aren't entirely misplaced.
> Scientology is not a religion, It is a business. (some would say mafia like business)
Hey, stop insulting the Mafia!
Sure, both the mob and the Co$ use violence and coercion to further their own ends, but at least the Mafia provides a range of valuable consumer services: recreational pharmaceuticals, sexual pleasure, gambling, and so on. Hangin' out at a mob-run outfit - or even just delivering pizza for the mob - can be fun. Didn'tcha ever read Snow Crash?
Last time I checked, the only recreational activity offered by the Co$ was talking to ashtrays, and the guests at a Co$ hotel's "spa" either received overdoses of Niacin in the sauna, or died of pulmonary embolisms brought on by dehydration and bed rest, and were nibbled on by cockroaches before their bodies were hauled off to the fifth-nearest hospital (but the nearest one with a Co$-appointed doctor!) for "emergency" treatment.
Mafia, Inc. (tm) provides the customer with a much higher level of satisfaction than Co$ ever did. :-)
My vote goes to Golias, for this post:
> [... ] it will likely spell the end of Hollywood's love affair with Scientology [ because ] Battlefield Earth has now associated Scientology with the term 'box-office poison'.
Speaking of lyrics.ch, why the hell wasn't there a mirror site? I found the original lyrics.ch site useful enough that I'd have gladly eaten up a few hundred megabytes of my hard drive to hold my own local copy of it ;)
> friendly in some way. The fact of the matter is, is that Bill doesn't want to look like
> the 'richest person in the world', he wants to look like your next door neighbor, somebody
> who you wouldn't dare of commiting such business atrocities.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed MSFT's use of informal language in press releases as a manipulative tactic.
Fsck your PR reps with a copy of Win2K sideways, Bill. We know exactly how your PR campain works, and we see straight through it.
> [
Is it just me, or does my bullshit detector go off the scale whenever I see multibillion dollar companies using apostrophes in press release?
Do these companies ever use "chatty" language riddled with apostrophes when speaking the "truth" (albeit bastardized) to their shareholders? Never. To their politicians? To their lobby groups? To their lawyers? Never, never, never.
The only time you'll see colloquialisms and apostrophes in press releases is when there's not even a grain of truth involved. It's a surefire sign that you're getting pure bullshit, as it were, as opposed to the normal, lower-grade bullshit that usually appears in press releases. It's a major red flag that says everything in the press release is a lie, that your argument doesn't have a leg to stand on, and the best your PR managers can do for you is to make you look "more human" by "talking down" to the peons in informal language.
When you or I do it on Slashdot, it's because we're speaking from the heart. When a PR flack does it, it's merely obvious that the sincerity is being faked. And poorly, at that.
We're not buying your act, Bill. Not for a fscking second. Use all the apostrophes you want. We see through your PR flacks.
> work on one machine. It will provide enormous inconvenience."
"Gee, Tonto, them sure is a lotta angry Injuns! We're in a heap o' trouble if they find us!"
"What you mean 'we', white boy?"
I can't help what Warnock will personally have, nor what will inconvenience him. But as for me, I will have music that will play on any device I own. I will have software that will work on all of my machines.
He's right in that "[heavy licensing] will provide enormous inconvenience". He's just not right in assuming it'll provide any inconvenience for anyone other than himself and the rest of his dinosaur buddies.
When it becomes sufficiently inconvenient for businesses to get the job done with closed-source, shrinkwrap-infested proprietary bloatware, it'll be in the interests of shareholders to move to something better. Officers of corporations will have a fiduciary duty to move to open source.
I can deal with that just fine. So can the company I write software for. Can Adobe and Micros~1?
> Maybe, with enough work, we could finally get him to say something useful for once
Hell, I'd be content for him to use the "1" key in his dates. A lowercase "l" hasn't been substitutable for a "1" in a date since the age of the typewriter.
It's not just this article - look at damn near every article it writes - every time he means "19xx" as a year, it types "l9xx".
Congrats to the coder who fixed the "Micros~1 compliant quotes" bug. Can we have him pipe its output through sed and s/l9/19/g before it goes to Slashdot in the next revision?
I suppose the original idea was to add a little "human touch" to it, because no software would make an error like that, only an older human raised on typewriters. But to me, it's just tiresome :-)
Clue readily accepted, with thanks ;-)
I have nothing against the site splitting the article and tracking users. If wired.com is supplying me with content, I'm happy to tell wired.com, through my mouse clicks, which wired.com stories I read all the way through. It's already in their server logs. So why do they need Doublefsck?
The only use of the LAYER tag on Wired is to send that information to third parties. Doublefsck isn't telling Wired what I'm reading - Wired's server already knows what I'm reading.
Doublefsck is trying to accumulate a profile that tells them what I read on every site that has doublefsck.com links in LAYER tags. Wired is the one I mention because it's so blatant - I see five or six LAYER tags being loaded in my browser's status bar with every mouse click. Sheesh. But how many other sites do I visit that are using the same technology, but only send one transaction and I've therefore missed? Salon? NY Times? The political parties and special interest groups? nakednatalies.com?
What I read off a site belongs between me and the content provider. Wired can tell I'm interested in MP3s, free speech, and cool hardware. mp3.com knows what kind of music I listen to. Nakednatalies.com knows I'm into hot grit pr0n. The political sites know what kind of a jackass, elephant, or neither I'm likely to vote for in October.
But if all four of those sites use tracking technology, then doublefsck knows all about my hobbies, my sexual tastes, and my politics.
I have a major problem with that.
Why should doublefsck know that I'm the type of guy who likes to watch elephants and jackasses mating on TV while pouring hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants while the Cocky Sticks play "I'm a Catholic Girl, of course I swallow!" in the background?
> when I see the URL points to some tracking cgi I say forget it. I want to know where I'm going to be sent before I click on something - and doubleclick is not a place I want to visit!
I think we're in complete agreement here. It's just that Doublefsck is sneaking a slimy tentacle into more than just banner ads through use of the LAYER tags and other invasive technologies.
Yes.
But IIRC, the wildcards don't work in the Windows version of HOSTS, though. So you can't just add "127.0.0.1 *.doubleclick.net" - you have to have an entry for each offending host. (Any Windoze folks who know otherwise, please enclue me - I don't think wildcards work on Windoze HOSTS files, but can't remember whether I tried it or not.)
On Windows, try the Ultimate HOSTS file.
While proxies are generally a Very Good Idea (and more elegant, since they can strip out the ad altogether or render it as a single-pixel GIF), I'm a fan of the philosophy of using as much stuff that's already built into your system as possible. Every application you add is another potential thing that can break. Using HOSTS on Windoze lets me fix it (and remove the fix) with a single command (and of course, the ever-present reboot). Nothing to "install" or "uninstall".
...that are worse than banners.
.GIFs.
/etc/hosts on a UNIX box, as this is basically the *opposite* of what /etc/hosts was designed for. But it's a damn effective solution on Windoze.)
For instance, I can surf with images off if I don't have a proxy handy, and avoid the animated
But there are other ways to track you that don't require banner ads. Look at all the layer tags:
<LAYER SRC="http://ln.doubleclick.net"></LAYER>
...in stories on http://www.wired.com lately.
Worse yet - because many news sites break up their stories into two or three "pages", the Doublecross.coms of the world don't just know *what* you read, but how *fast* you read it, and whether you read just the first page and throw it away as "uninteresting" or the followup pages of the article.
*THAT*'s the value of breaking news articles up into dozens of 2-paragraph pieces, by the way. The extra banner impressions aren't worth it, but the tracking information you get as to which users read which stories all the way through is worth its weight in gold.
What we need is a HOWto on route. One per platform, covering all the idiosyncrasies. Don't write it for sysadmins, write it for everyone, like the guy who just installed DeadRat and has a root prompt.
We need to make this:
# route add -host ln.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 -blackhole
...a part of our setups, and we need it to scale up to all the tracking sites. (I'd guess at least 1000, maybe 2000 hosts at present.)
We need to tell our users what to put in what files, and how to extend it to the rest of their network, and how to make it *stick* no matter how many times DNS tries to bring it back from the dead. (Fscking Slowaris fscking fsck fsck fsck! I should *NOT* have to run that route command more than once per bootup!)
Windoze users have the ability of creating a huge HOSTS file in their system directory. It's a one-step thing. Trivial.
A quickie HOWTO on how to do the same thing, for all the various Unices, would be a welcome addition. (It's kinda an ugly fix to do this in
Right - it's meant in irony - the source is Voltaire's commentary on the court-martial and hanging of Admiral Byng. (Byng was grossly outnumbered, and ran away - as a result, he was executed for "cowardice".)
"C'est necessaire quelquefois a suspendre un admiral ou deux, pour encourager les autres." ("It is necessary sometimes, to hang an admiral or two, to encourage/enhearten the others" ;-)
Although Voltaire originally meant it in the sense of "beatings will continue until morale improves", the quip has also developed a second sense, namely "punish excessively and make an example out of the offender". While not quite historically faithful, it certainly has a nice ring to it when used in conjunction with the image of a row of spammer heads on pikes.
> On va leur couper les couilles et leur faire manger, violer leur femme et mettre leur tête sur un pic... (that's better :)
Well, I dunno.
As for leur couper les couilles et leur faire manger, you'd starve to death on the contents thereof, and as for violer leur femme, we're talking about spammers here. Given what goes into spammer DNA, do you really think a spammers's mother, sister, or first cousin is gonna be much to look at? OK, not every spammer falls into that category, but the few spammers who didn't marry blood relatives are probably hooked up with goats and sheep, which is just Not My Kink.
But I'm still up for the heads on pikes bit.
Absolutely - any system administrator who leaves his relay open for abuse is incompetent.
But I disagree with you here:
> [ ... ] I don't think they deserve any compensation [ ... ] It's their own fault [ ... ]
While they're dorks for not having secured it, this is just blaming the victim.
Although it's not smart for a woman to walk down a dark alley at 3 in the morning, staggering as if drunk, while wearing a miniskirt and low-cut blouse that doesn't mean "she asked for it" if she ends up raped. (My apologies to rape victims for that example - you're the best example I can think of to explain that "blame the victim" is bogus.)
The incompetence of the admins at Market Visions (whose server, like all open relays, essentially was staggering down a blind alley, sloshed to the gills, wearing a low-cut blouse and hot pink mini...) does not take away from the fact that their property was violated, nor should it, IMHO, detract from their rights to compensation.
(Of course, we're in complete agreement that a more competent admin would have prevented the problem from requiring a lawsuit or criminal charges in the first place. That's why you pay your admins the big bucks -- preventing a breach is always cheaper than cleaning up after one, and a good sysadmin is worth his or her weight in gold.)
Juno and Hotmail have sued spammers (e.g., the "TCPS" spammer from a couple of years back) for forging their domain names into fake email addresses inserted in the From: header. The forging caused clueless people to send countless bogus abuse reports to Juno and Hotmail abuse desks, consuming their resources. IIRC, uu.net got into the act too, as most of the spams were coming from a long series of uu.net dialups in an area of NYC that didn't have caller-ID.
There's the "flowers.com case", where a spammer issued a forged HELO flowers.com when doing a spam in order to fool (ancient) versions of Sendmail into hiding the spammer's originating IP address when raping a third-party relay. $65000 in damages because it defamed the legitimate owner of flowers.com at the time.
It's trademark infringement as well. You purport that your mail comes from AOL, it's AOL's business that you're using their domain name. AOL's landsharks have been known to sue spammers for falsely implying that spam comes from AOL. More power to 'em.
Finally, in the cases of "joe jobs" - where a spammer will forge spam in the name of someone in order to target the forged party for harassment - it's obvious that there's intent to defame, harass, and of course, willful misrepresentation.
The forging of headers in unsolicited bulk email should be at the very least a civil, if not a criminal, offense.
The real problem, of course, is that since your average spammer lives in a trailer surrounded by beer cans and chicken bones, collecting anything from a spammer can be a real problem.
Which is why it's relatively rare that ISPs sue or press criminal charges against spammers. More's the pity. There's a group of spammers operating out of Earthlink dialups in a manner identical to that of the TCPS spammer's abuse of uu.net dialups a few years ago, and Earthlink is doing nothing about it. More's the pity.
But back to the original article on ABCNews:
The son of a bitch not only spammed, but he raped a relay to do it. That's theft of computer services at a minimum, and given the number of bounced spams that probably came back to the raped relay at Market Vision, probably a DOS attack too.
Throw the book at the son of a bitch and put his head on a pike. Pour encourager les autres.